I am planning to add dedicated plotting drives to my desktop. Here is the current setup:
i9-10900F
Asus ROG Strix Z490 e Gaming Mobo
Team T-Force Zeus DDR4-3200 64GB
2x Black SN850 2TBWestern Digital Gold 10 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
Marvell 88SE9215 SATA Controller on PCIe x4 for extra HDDs
4x WD 18 TB Red
RMx Series™ RM850x
Phanteks Enthoo Pro
CoolerMaster MasterLiquid ML240L RGB V2
Kingston 240GB A400 SSD 2.5’’ SATA 7MM 2.5-Inch SA400S37/240G for OS
Graphics: ROG Strix GTX 3070 TI (I like to play games sometimes, not mining any other crypto)
Since I play games and use this desktop to watch 4k/ 8k content on my TV, I would rather have cheap dedicated SAS drives for plotting vs using my NVMe drives (they are now at 80% health after only plotting 25 TiB). Here is what I am planning to buy:
1x SATA/SAS Array Card PCI-E X8 6Gb/s Internal 6 Gbps SAS/SATA Ports Controller RAID Card for LSI 9260-8i /IBM M5015 46M0851
5x SEAGATE 1TB 7.2K 3.5" SAS ST31000424SS CONSTELLATION ES *512 FORMAT
Questions:
What cables do I use to connect the HDD to the SAS controller? Description says that I can attach 32 drives to this card, but I only see 2 ports:
Here is the detailed description: Specification: Eight internal 6 Gbps SAS/SATA ports Optional two mini-SAS internal connectors (SFF-8087) 6 Gbps throughput per port 800 MHz processor with LSI SAS2108 6 Gbps RAID on Chip (ROC) controller x8 PCI-E 2.0 host interface Onboard data cache (DDR2 running at 800 MHz): ServeRAID M5015: 512 MB Battery Backup Unit BBU08 Live Failure Indicator Connects to up to 32 SAS or SATA drives RAID Levels: 0, 1, 5 RAID Extension: 10, 50 Automatic recovery during reconstruction Automatic Recovery during Reconstruction Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) Online RAID Level Upgrade (RLM) Global and Special Hot Spare Parts with Recoverable Hot Spare Parts Support Function Automatic Reconstruction Container Affinity Emergency SATA Hot Spare Parts for SAS Array Unified Controller Multipath (Failover) I/O Load Balancing Comprehensive and comprehensive RAID Management Suite LSI 6Gb/s storage adapter is compatible with existing 3Gb/s SATA and SASDHDD Spread Spectrum Clocking, SSC, Decision Feedback Equalization, DFE, Expander Self-Discovery, Self-Configuration, Standardized Zoning. Package list: 1 x M5015 Array Card
You need breakout cables that go from those SFF-8087 connectors you have to whatever you’re connecting it to - e.g. each cable has 4 sata.
Apparently they also have forward and reverse types and I believe you should get the forward type.
And make sure you either get one with IT mode firmware, or JBOD capability in the card so you can use software RAID, which is typically better these days.
Specification: Eight internal 6 Gbps SAS/SATA ports Optional two mini-SAS internal connectors (SFF-8087) Where do you see it saying 32 drives, you get 4 drives per port. And I hope you don’t use 1tb drives
I think you are thinking of something more like this. You can buy this to go alongside your HBA, and it will allow you to connect 4 drives per sas port.
Thanks everyone, I feel like I need to learn a lot more before I invest in this setup. I don’t wanna keep spending and sit on hardware if I can’t start using it. Have started watching some Youtube videos to begin with. Will report my progress here. Thank you so much for being so supportive and helpful
It is just easier and cheaper to buy an ssd dedicated for plotting. Get a pcie gen3 tlc ssd like wd black 1TB and it will get the job done. Less hardware, cheaper, less power consumption, less physical space, zero noise
And that is a SAS expander, so is useless without an HBA. You connect a SAS Expander to an HBA (Host Bus Adapter), you can use one cable between the two, or use two cables/dual link if compatible. The PCIe connector on a SAS expander is purely for power - the data goes via the cables.
You can buy it from amazon. or you can check this link.